COLLAPSING STAR

Jesse Nathan

Your amethyst earring on the edge of an earthly sink, I inhale your age of sage and pine, I inhale a particularity that could eat everything for a thousand years like a collapsing star, some angel of nervous light, our shape in a mirror, a forest, a garden … But nothing will stand in, nothing complete, not even the coast road we took until a rockslide halfway closed the way, and what else to do but pose with the ocean behind us in its currents and distant liners and a moon of pocked truths.

PEBBLES Kim Ok

translated by Ryan Choi

With so many complaints eighteen to be exact lodged in the heart of my soul, at the boathouse with no path that leads to it through the jungly meadow, I collect pebbles one by one, and slowly the summer day dwindles.

As I watch the rows of white sails hundreds to be exact bobbing in the heart of the distance, laughing aloud I ready the pebbles in my grip for war, and slowly I forget there are hundreds of sails and I am only one.

Ambition

Anders Carlson-Wee

To suffer none of it. Money, work, or obligation.

To face the days free of roles. No title. No position.

To get by on found food, castoff clothes, scams and hustles and handouts.

To wonder about judgment less than about stealing the time it takes to wonder.

To have stolen time. And be lost on how best to squander it.

Ali Bektaş is a molecular biologist working on plants, microbes, and agriculture, and is developing distributed, affordable, and simple systems of detecting informative nucleic acids. He is from Istanbul and lives in Oakland, California. He can be reached at ali @ purplecitylabs.com.

Max Blecher (1909 – 1938) was treated for spinal tuberculosis in various European sanatoria, including Berck, and these experiences form the basis of his final two novels, Scarred Hearts (Old Street, 2008) and The Illuminated Burrow A Sanatorium Journal (Twisted Spoon Press, 2022). During his short yet productive life, Blecher was also an artist, translator, poet, and essayist. Hailed as “Romania’s Kafka,” his poignant yet often humorous descriptions of daily life reveal the influence of surrealism. Blecher formed connections within the surrealist movement with writers such as André Breton, Tristan Tzara, André Gide, Gherasim Luca, and Mihail Sebastian. He died at the age of 28.

Bryan Byrdlong is Chicago born and bred! Boulevard Magazine. Boundless. Bright. Bee-whisperer.

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings, forthcoming from W. W. Norton this fall, and The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection. He is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents and lives in Los Angeles.

Michelle Chihara is editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books

Ryan Choi is the author of the forthcoming books In Dreams: The Very Short Works of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and “Three Demons”: A Study on Sanki Saitō’s Haiku. He is an editor at AGNI, whose work appears in Harper’s, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Meghan Maguire Dahn is the author of Domain (Burnside Review Press, 2022) and the chapbook

Lucid Animal (Harbor Review Editor’s Series, 2021). She grew up in the middle of the woods, but has settled in New York City with her family, where there Zis a surprising amount of wildlife.

Camila Fabbri is a writer, playwright, and actress from Buenos Aires. The author of two short story collections, a novel, and several plays, she was recently included in Granta 155: The Best of Young SpanishLanguage Novelists 2.

Hallie Gayle is a writer from Texas. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and is a recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.

Gauri Gill (b. 1970 Chandigarh, India) is a NewDelhi based photographer. Various ongoing projects highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and “active listening,” and in using photography as a memory practice. Gill’s work addresses the Indian identity markers of caste, class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in it there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival. She has exhibited within India and internationally including the 58th Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, New York, Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, Kochi Biennale 2016 and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography. Gill published the following books with Edition Patrick Frey: Balika Mela (2012), Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023).

ML Kejera is an Illinois-based writer from The Gambia. He has been short-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and is a recipient of the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship for his in-progress novel The Dictator’s Eidolon, for which he is seeking representation. “Football, Football, Football” forms part of the novel. Kindly tweet him pictures of your favorite pizza @ KejeraL.

Sandra Lim is the author of three collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Curious Thing (W. W. Norton, 2021). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Koritha Mitchell is the author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture (2020) and Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (2011) and editor of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2023 edition) and Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy (2018 edition). She is also president-elect of the

Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF). She’s on Twitter @ ProfKori.

Chris Molnar is the founder and publisher of Archway Editions (literary imprint of powerHouse Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster) and co-founder of the Writer’s Block bookshop in Las Vegas. His fiction and nonfiction have recently appeared in Tiding House and BOMB, among others.

Robin Myers is a poet, translator, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent projects include In Vitro by Isabel Zapata (Coffee House Press, 2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books, 2023), and Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books, 2022).

Jesse Nathan grew up in Berkeley and rural Kansas. Lives now in Northern California and teaches literature at Cal. Poetry appears in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New Republic. First book due out in September, called Eggtooth.

Laura Nelson seeks to celebrate and co-organize spaces of study and gathering. She is currently a Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California.

Kim Ok, born in Jeongju, North P’yong’an, was a poet and translator who published some of the first modernist poems and translations of Western poetry and literary theory in Korean. Kidnapped by agents of the Kim (Il-sung) regime during the Korean War, he was last recorded alive in 1958 at a farm collective in North Korea.

Gabi Reigh moved to the UK from Romania at the age of 12. In 2017, she won the Stephen Spender Prize, which inspired her to translate more Romanian literature. As part of her Interbellum Series project, she has translated interwar novels, poetry, and drama by Lucian Blaga, Liviu Rebreanu, Mihail Sebastian, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, and Max Blecher. Her translation of Blecher’s final novel The Illuminated Burrow A Sanatorium Journal was published in 2022 by Twisted Spoon Press, and a collection of Blecher’s poetry, short prose, and letters will be published later this year.

Nobuo Sekine (b. 1942, Saitama, Japan; d. 2019, Los Angeles, CA) first gained renown for his work in sculpture and installation art in late 1960s and 1970s Japan. He made an indelible impact on the course of Japanese art history, when he exhibited Phase Mother Earth at the 1st Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition at the Suma Rikyū Park in Kobe in late 1968. This iconic work inspired artist-theorist Lee Ufan to develop new theories. These theories provided a conceptual framework within which to understand the work of several artists working in the similarly ephemeral, site-specific modes who along with Sekine and Lee came to be referred to as Mono-ha (“school of things”). His work is represented in numerous institutional collections including Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, Japan; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Takamatsu, Japan.

Salma Shamel lives between Cairo and New York City. She is a PhD candidate at New York University. Her work focuses on critical theory, Marxism, disability, and intellectual history.

Juliana Spahr is sometimes a poet, sometimes an editor, sometimes a scholar, sometimes other things, too.

Rajesh Vangad (b. 1975, Ganjad, India) is a bearer of the Warli style of painting, a form of painting belonging to the indigenous Warli people. He learned the art at a young age from his mother, Ladhki Devi; and later from masters like Jivya Soma Mashe. He has painted notable murals at the Craft Museum, New Delhi, the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai and the T2 Terminal at the International Airport in Mumbai. Vangad has published three books: My Gandhi Story (Tulika Books), Kabir Saamagri (as part of the Kabir Project) and The Indian Crafts Journey, as well as a map of Maharashtra (Dastkaar Haat Samiti). His work has been exhibited across India as well as internationally, and the collaborative series made along with the photographer Gauri Gill called Fields of Sight has been included in exhibitions around the world, including Documenta 14, Kassel; the 7th Moscow Biennale, and Prospect 4, New Orleans.